Photo Collections

You may download and print low-resolution images for private study and research.

Copies of these images at high resolution can be purchased from the Society for your own personal non-commercial use. Click here for current charges and an order form.

We regret we are unable to supply photo prints.

Many of the images are also available for publication or commercial use. Click here to contact us for more information.

All images are supplied in good faith that copyright is owned by the Cumbria Industrial History Society.

The Mike Davies-Shiel Collection

Mike Davies-Shiel was the leading authority on many if not most aspects of Cumbria’s industrial history, about which he spent many years researching, writing, teaching and inspiring others.

Over a period of 40 years Mike Davies-Shiel took many thousands of photos of buildings and machinery, places and people. To these he added photos of anything that would help in his research on a subject or place – maps, newspaper cuttings, paintings etc.. Together they present a fascinating record of times gone by. All the photos were gifted to the Cumbria Industrial History Society after his death in 2009.

The collection contains more than 15,000 colour slides and some black-and-white photos. These have all now been catalogued and digitised, so that the originals can be safely stored by the Cumbria Archive Service.

Low resolution copies of all of the images are being added to the Cumbria Archive Service’s on-line catalogue CASCAT. For help with searching the collection click on Finding Photos.

Many of them are also being added to this website, to complement and illustrate the subjects covered.